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The ancient Romans quite literally surrounded themselves with the dead: masks of the dead were in the atria of their houses, funerals paraded through their main marketplace, and tombs lined the roads leading into and out of the city. In Roman literature as well, the dead occupy a prominent place, indicating a close and complex relationship between literature and society. The evocation of the dead in the Latin authors of the first century BCE both responds and contributes to changing socio-political conditions during the transition from the Republic to the Empire. To understand the literary life of the Roman dead, The Ghosts of the Past develops a new perspective on Latin literature's interac...
Explores the variety of bonds that are formed between writers and the figure of the dead lover
The first book-length treatment of artistic ecphrasis in Roman literature, The Captor's Image challenges pervasive views to argue for it as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures.
In the eyes of posterity, ancient Rome is deeply flawed. The list of censures is long and varied, from political corruption and the practice of slavery, to religious intolerance and sexual immorality, yet for centuries the Romans' "errors" have not only provoked opprobrium, but also inspired wayward and novel forms of thought and representation, themselves errant in the broad sense of the Latin verb. This volume is the first to examine this phenomenon in depth, treating examples from history, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and art history, from antiquity to the present, to examine how the Romans' faults have become the basis for creative experimentation, for rejections of prevailing...
Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the "triumviral" Horace of Satires, book 1, all revea...
An interdisciplinary exploration of Roman cultural appropriation, offering new insights into the processes through which Rome made and remade itself.
"Building in Words explores the relation between text and architecture in the Roman world from a new angle. Ancient Roman viewers were not only confronted with finished monuments, but also frequently with buildings under construction. They experienced noisy building work, disruptive transportation of materials, and sometimes spectacular engineering feats. This book analyses how Roman writers responded to the process of building and construction in their works. For Roman authors, telling stories of architectural creation served to give meaning to finished monuments. Representing a building's construction might encourage admiration of its artistry, cost, or labour. On the other hand, it could ...
The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.
The first in-depth examination of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius' Metamorphoses
In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.